Last week, I published a post about Yahoo Site Explorer Alternatives.
Then I got a comment from one of my readers, Ian Szalinski.
That comment made me double-check what I knew about Majestic SEO (I do hate being proven wrong, so I always make sure I know the answer first).
And after I did that, I – with all the confidence and authority – responded to him:
Then he says “But Ana…“, which makes me a bit aggravated since now I had to go back to Majestic SEO to do some more research and ended up coming back to him humbled…
All I can say is Thank You, Ian.
Not only you taught me a lesson in humility, but also introduced me to a great way to use such a powerful backlink checking tool for FREE.
Here’s what I learned about Majestic SEO and how we can use it to stay on top of our competition.
Majestic SEO Review
What Is Majestic SEO?
Basically, Majestic SEO is a backlink research tool with a huge database of links.
I know that’s a simplistic explanation, but I think you get the point.
Majestic SEO is also not the easiest tool to use.
Why?
Because it provides too much information – yes, this is the case of too much of a good thing.
Additionally, there are plenty of posts written about Majestic SEO all over the web; the problem is they complicate it even further, in my opinion.
I realize that most of my readers are not SEO specialists and are not planning to become one in the near future.
So in this post, I’ll go over SOME of the features that will be useful to YOU and show you how to use them to improve your search engine rankings and get more SEO traffic.
Who Is Majestic SEO for?
- SEOs – obviously;
- New media specialists;
- Affiliate managers;
- Product owners (great way to find affiliates for your product);
- Every business owner looking to improve their rankings.
What Is Majestic SEO for?
You can use Majestic SEO for:
- Link building;
- Reputation Management;
- Competitor analysis;
- Monitoring news,
- SEO services
- etc, etc, etc.
This is the kind of reports Majestic SEO provides:
Since SEOBook didn’t mind sharing their backlinks, I borrowed their image for this post – you can also get a 20% discount for the first month of Majestic SEO paid subscriptions in that post.
How to make the most of Majestic SEO with a free account
This is the part I didn’t know before that comment from Ian.
What you need to do is create an account with them and then register your site.
1. Register an account.
Click on the “Register” link in the top navigation menu or click on this link (will open in a new window so that you can follow my instructions).
Once you are registered and logged in, proceed to the following step.
2. Create a report.
This is where it got tricky for me even the second time around; why wouldn’t they just add a “Register Your Site” button somewhere we can see it!
In the top navigation bar, find “Reports and Tools”.
Scroll down the page until you see the “Create Report field.
Enter your URL and click on “Create Report“.
It’ll take you to the following screen where you will click on “Create a Free Report“.
You’ll be taken to the following page:
You’ll need that last part of the URL that I blacked out in the next step.
Now it’s time to verify our site.
3. Verify your site
They didn’t make this one easy either.
You have to log into your CPanel and add a file to your main directory.
I promise it’s not as hard as it sounds.
Once you are in your CPanel, go to your site root directory and, once there, click on “New File”.
I am with Hostgator and this is what this process looks like for me:
After that just copy and paste the last part of the URL Majestic SEO created for you on the “Create Free Report” page – the one I blacked out in my screenshot above – in the New File window as the name of your new file; click Create New File.
You are done!
With this step, anyway…
4. Back to Majestic SEO
…where all you need to do is to select the type of report you’d like to generate, agree to conditions, and click on the button to have your site verified.
Note: there was another piece of instructions about your robot.txt file, which I didn’t have to touch; it worked just fine and most likely will for your site as well.
Your absolutely free report will be generated within minutes depending on how big your site is.
What can you do with your free report
The report will give you a great insight into where your site stands in terms of link building.
Majestic SEO will tell you which sites link to you, to what particular pages, with what anchor text, and whether the links are do or nofollow.
However, the best part is the fact that all links can be sorted by AC Rank – Majestic SEO way to measure of how important a page is based on the number of unique referring external root domains. The higher the rank, the more valuable the page.
The report will help you to see:
- Which top pages link to you and make sure you keep those links.
- Which content on your site is the most linkable. Once you know that, you need to make sure you continue to build links to these particular pages to get them ranked for your desired keywords.
- Also, once you know your top pages, make sure you do some internal linking from those pages to some of your other pages, which you consider important, but which haven’t received much backlink attention yet.
- If you are hoping to rank a page for a certain keyword, but you see that most of the incoming links have the wrong anchor text in them, you can contact the site owner that links to you and request to change the anchor text. This is an excellent way to leverage your existing links.
Of course, the real value of Majestic SEO lies in the ability to analyze your competitors’ links, find the top pages that link to them and see if you can get links from those pages as well.
Of course, this part of Majestic SEO is not free, but if you are serious about SEO, it’s well worth it.
Here’s the link to Majestic SEO pricing page.
Note: Majestic SEO doesn’t currently offer an affiliate program, so these are all straight links.
Other Majestic SEO Tools
Here are some other free ways to use Majestic SEO.
SITE EXPLORER
This is where you can get a snapshot of ANY site for free.
The SEOBook screenshot above comes from Site Explorer, so you can see the wealth of information you get.
Also, it’ll show you the top five links for the site you are analyzing.
BACKLINK HISTORY
This tool shows backlink discovery by month and will let you analyze up to 4 sites at a time, i.e. compare your site against your competition.
For instance, I compared the top three sites, including Traffic Generation Cafe, currently ranked in the top 3 spots for “traffic generation“.
Happy to report that the yellow line is Traffic Generation Cafe.
Now if I can only outranked them with all those links… lol
NEIGHBORHOOD CHECKER
Are you hosting your site in a bad neighborhood?
Neighborhood checker will show you the other sites hosted on the same IP as yours, which will allow you to determine if any of them appear to be spammy and thus potentially dangerous neighbors to have for valid sites hosted on the same IP or even subnet.
Final Thoughts on Majestic SEO
Yes, there are plenty of free things we can do with Majestic SEO.
However, most of those features are just fun to play with and most of us, busy online business owners, don’t have time for fun!
I believe that we need the tool that will actually do the job of checking on our competitors’ links and do it efficiently and without the expense of a monthly subscription.
Once again, I stand by the conclusion I came to in my Yahoo! Site Explorer alternatives post: the two of my favorite tools to check backlinks are…
1. Market Samurai
Most of you already own it anyway, might as well use it to its fullest potential. After all, it does use Majestic SEO to power its SEO Competition module.
If you don’t own it yet, I highly recommend it as the best “all-around” SEO tool that includes keyword research, backlink research, and more.
==>Take Market Samurai for a test drive
Buying tip: if you do decide to buy Market Samurai, sign up for your free trial above and wait for the team to email you a 35% discount coupon.
Also, even if you decide not to join the club of Market Samurai owners, your keyword research module will remain active – completely free.
2. SEOSpyGlass
This one is a great FREE alternative, designed specifically for backlink checking – for any site.
==>Download your free SEOSpyGlass copy
Marketing Takeaway
Whichever tool you decided to use, make sure you use something.
Finding out where you competitors’ links are coming from is the easiest way to match and outrank them = MORE FREE SEO TRAFFIC for your site!
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